Children with intellectual disability (ID) tend to have difficulty with mastering fundamental movement skills, associated with cognitive deficits that impair skill acquisition. In this case study, motor learning evidence was transformed into an object control skills training program for children with ID in a school context. An implementation…

The emerging field of mathematics educational neuroscience provides researchers with new approaches to understanding mathematical development, as well mathematics itself. This paper focuses on the role of the hand in constructing mathematics through activity. We rely on Piaget's distinction of three kinds of activity: sensorimotor activity,…

For children with moderate or severe cerebral palsy (CP), a foundational early goal is independent sitting. Sitting offers additional opportunities for object exploration, play and social engagement. The achievement of sitting coincides with important milestones in other developmental areas, such as social engagement with others, understanding of…

Modern intelligent agents will need to learn the actions that humans perform. They will need to recognize these actions when they see them and they will need to perform these actions themselves. We want to propose a cognitive system that interprets human manipulation actions from perceptual information (image and depth data) and consists of…

Five experiments investigated the importance of shape and object manipulation when 12-month-olds were given the task of individuating objects representing exemplars of kinds in an event-mapping design. In Experiments 1 and 2, results of the study from Xu, Carey, and Quint (2004, Experiment 4) were partially replicated, showing that infants were…

Bingham, Schmidt, & Rosenblum, (1989) showed that people are able to select, by hefting balls, the optimal weight for each size ball to be thrown farthest. We now investigate function learning and smart mechanisms as hypotheses about how this affordance is perceived. Twenty-four unskilled adult throwers learned to throw by practicing with a subset…

G. P. Bingham, R. C. Schmidt, and L. D. Rosenblum (1989) found that, by hefting objects of different sizes and weights, people could choose the optimal weight in each size for throwing to a maximum distance. In Experiment 1, the authors replicated this result. G. P. Bingham et al. hypothesized that hefting is a smart mechanism that allows objects…

Recent studies (Chiviacowsky & Wulf, 2002, 2005) have shown that learners prefer to receive feedback after they believe they had a "good" rather than "poor" trial. The present study followed up on this finding and examined whether learning would benefit if individuals received feedback after good relative to poor trials. Participants practiced a…

Because sensorimotor and environmental factors have a profound effect on children's learning, every teacher should know how to weave strategies from occupational therapy (OT) into their everyday instruction. This is the guidebook K-3 teachers need to "think like an OT"--and form effective partnerships with OTs in their schools--so all students can…

The primary purpose of the present study was to determine whether recent findings documenting the benefits of text-related motor activity on young children's memory for reading passages [Glenberg, A. M., Gutierrez, T., Levin, J. R., Japuntich, S., & Kaschak, M. (2004). Activity and imagined activity can enhance young readers' reading…

This study investigated the role that visual tracking plays in coupling rhythmic limb movements to an environmental rhythm. Two experiments were conducted in which participants swung a hand-held pendulum while tracking an oscillating stimulus or while keeping their eyes fixed on a stationary location directly above an oscillating stimulus. It…

The experiments examined qualitative and quantitative changes in the dynamics of learning a novel motor skill (roller ball task) as a function of the manipulation of a control parameter (initial ball speed). The focus was on the relation between the rates of change in performance over practice time and the changing time scales of the evolving…

Four experiments studied the perception of the unity and boundaries of objects by 88 4-month-old infants who manipulated them out of the visual field. Infants perceived the unity/boundaries of these objects by detecting the motion patterns they themselves produced. Discrimination between motion patterns transferred from touch to vision. (SLD)

Examined infants' ability to retrieve an object from atop a slightly larger object. Found that even 5-month-olds could retrieve objects close in size and fully contiguous with their bases when demands on reaching skill were reduced. Proposed that when they fail this task, it is because they lack the skill to reach the top object without…

THE PURPOSE OF THIS STUDY WAS TO FIND OUT WHETHER SOCIAL CLASS DIFFERENCES IN INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT ARE PRESENT IF (1) CHILDREN FROM SOCIALLY DISORGANIZED SLUM FAMILIES ARE COMPARED WITH CHILDREN FROM STABLE, LOW INCOME AND MIDDLE INCOME FAMILIES, (2) THE PIAGET OBJECT SCALE, A NEW MEASURE OF COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT BASED ON PIAGET'S SENSORIMOTOR…